Today in History November 12

954 – The 13-year-old Lothair III is crowned at the Abbey of Saint-Remi as king of the West Frankish Kingdom.

1793 – Jean Sylvain Bailly, the first Mayor of Paris, is guillotined.

1912 – The frozen bodies of Robert Scott and his men are found on the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica.

1927 – Leon Trotsky is expelled from the Soviet Communist Party, leaving Joseph Stalin in undisputed control of the Soviet Union.

1936 – The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge opens to traffic.

1941 – World War II: Temperatures around Moscow drop to -12 °C as the Soviet Union launches ski troops for the first time against the freezing German forces near the city.

1954 – Ellis Island ceased operations.

1979 – Iran hostage crisis: In response to the hostage situation in Tehran, US President Jimmy Carter orders a halt to all petroleum imports into the United States from Iran.

1980 – The NASA space probe Voyager I makes its closest approach to Saturn and takes the first images of its rings.

1981 – Space Shuttle program: Mission STS-2, utilizing the Space Shuttle Columbia, marks the first time a manned spacecraft is launched into space twice.

1990 – Tim Berners-Lee publishes a formal proposal for the World Wide Web.

1997 – Ramzi Yousef is found guilty of masterminding the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

2001 – American Airlines Flight 587, an Airbus A300 en route to the Dominican Republic, crashes minutes after takeoff from John F. Kennedy International Airport, killing all 260 on board and five on the ground.

2011 – A blast in Iran’s Shahid Modarres missile base leads to the death of 17 of the Revolutionary Guards members, including Hassan Tehrani Moghaddam, a key figure in Iran’s missile program.

Auguste Rodin in his studio

1729 – Louis Antoine de Bougainville, French admiral and explorer (d. 1811)

1795 – Thaddeus William Harris, entomologist and botanist (d. 1856)

1840 – Auguste Rodin, sculptor and illustrator, created The Thinker (d. 1917)

1889 – DeWitt Wallace, American publisher and philanthropist, co-founded Reader’s Digest (d. 1981)

1923 – Ian Graham, English archaeologist and explorer (d. 2017)

1929 – Grace Kelly, American actress, later Princess Grace of Monaco (d. 1982)

1934 – Charles Manson, American cult leader (d. 2017)

1943 – Wallace Shawn, American actor, comedian and playwright

1944 – Booker T. Jones, pianist, saxophonist, songwriter, and producer

1945 – Neil Young, Canadian singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer

973 – Burchard III, Frankish nobleman (b. c.915)

1094 – Duncan II of Scotland (b. 1060)

1595 – John Hawkins, English admiral and shipbuilder (b. 1532)

1916 – Percival Lowell, astronomer, mathematician, and author (b. 1855)

1993 – H. R. Haldeman,  Richard Nixon’s Chief of Staff (b. 1926)

2018 – Stan Lee, comic book writer, editor, and publisher (b. 1922